Bleisure Travel: Next Level of ‘Business and Pleasure’

Nothing is as black and white as it used to be in the past – technology has blurred the lines between work and play, career and downtime, professional and personal. From freelancing through digital nomads to “bleisure” travel, life has never been as convenient as it is now.

This is a guest post from Phill Anchman. Phill is a Sydney based blogger focused on squeezing the aesthetic essence and poetic value out of every travel destination. He moves through cities and lands and devours them with all of his senses, he’s like a Pac-man, only he does leave something behind – blog posts like this. You can follow him on High Style Life.

Combining business travel with leisure time is one of the latest and fastest-growing business travel trends. Similar to other irritating terms of 21st-century concepts, such as “Brexit” and “bromance,” merging business and personal travel is known as “bleisure.”

The idea is to turn work into fun, by embracing this hybrid form of travel. In this article we examine what bleisure travel is, why it is the future of work-life balance, and what challenges this trend is facing.

Benefits of Bleisure

No matter how dynamic frequent business trips are, it can get disheartening to fly for 10 hours and get to see nothing but a conference room. Moreover, with tight schedules and no company, traveling for work tends to be a tiring and stressful experience.

This is why bleisure is the ultimate incentive for a productive and fulfilled lifestyle. It allows employees to deepen client relationship by staying in a place longer, enjoy some downtime, and have a mini-vacation all while doing a good job.

It’s no wonder that more and more employers are becoming keen on this idea, and consequently employees are more willing to volunteer for business trips. Mixing business trips with leisure time is allowing workers to save money and transform what can be an inconvenient or dull trip away into a pleasurable stay.

With only one day off or part of a weekend squeezed into a business trip, you’ll have an opportunity to learn more about the place, visit places, and simply relax and enjoy. This way, work stress levels are significantly lowered, motivation increased, performance enhanced, and both sides are satisfied.

Challenges of Bleisure

Bleisure travel is not really a new phenomenon, most employers allow it and those who don’t have at least heard of the concept. Almost three-quarters of corporate travelers say they tack leisure days on to business trips, and the vast majority, i.e. around 90 percent of companies allow this.

However, most of these lucky “bleisurers” aren’t protected during those additional days by their companies’ travel risk policies. This can result in avoiding leisure time in risky environments, and possible misunderstandings between employees and employers regarding on-duty care.

Your organization can find itself in a legal grey area which, in case anything happened to a traveler during the “leisure” time, it can have negative reputational, financial and legal impacts. This is why it’s advised to tackle this challenge by developing written guidelines for bleisure travel alongside your existing travel policies.

Best destinations for Bleisure

There are many countries around the world offering outstanding destinations that check many of the boxes both for business and leisure. Criteria when choosing one, if you have the liberty to do so, should always be ease of transportation, safety, dining out options and quality of business facilities. Cities that consistently rank high for this kind of endeavor are Tokyo, Sidney, Singapore, NYC, San Diego and Perth.

But these options do have their weaknesses, some are seldom considered highly livable (e.g. cost of living, etc), while others under-perform in other areas. Newcomers that seem to do great on both fields, while not being too popular and overcrowded, are cities in Canada and Alaska, such as Vancouver, Montreal or Anchorage.

Considering the prediction that millennials will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025, the concept of mixing pleasure and business is certainly not going anywhere any time soon. And why would it?

This tried-and-tested formula is a game-changer for work travelers, so talk your boss into it if they aren’t a bleisure supporter already, and make every trip feel a lot more like vacation and less like work.

This was a guest post from Phill Anchman. Phill is a Sydney based blogger focused on squeezing the aesthetic essence and poetic value out of every travel destination. He moves through cities and lands and devours them with all of his senses, he’s like a Pac-man, only he does leave something behind – blog posts like this. You can follow him on High Style Life.

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